


in my dreams

by leap4joyak



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: M/M, MAJOR SPOILERS FOR CAPTAIN AMERICAN: THE WINTER SOLDIER, brief descriptions of violence, brief discussions of suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-07
Updated: 2014-05-07
Packaged: 2018-01-18 11:19:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1426552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leap4joyak/pseuds/leap4joyak
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Of course it's him.  Who else could it be?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Go see this movie. Inspired, at least in part, by hellotailor’s review.  
>  **official spoiler warning: this story contains major spoilers for all of the endings of Captain America: the Winter Soldier. Do Not Read if you don’t want them.**
> 
> Recommended Listening: [Black & Blue](http://youtu.be/fgrqvLMWGOc), by Chris Garneau

He's breathing. That’s all that matters.

* * *

When he walks away, the man he leaves is breathing on the loamy sand, still half submerged in the murky, rust colored water of the Potomac River. The man who walks away does not know the place names, and doesn't care to, and never wants to set foot in this city again.

When he walks away, he feels the sun on the back of his neck for the first time in forever and realizes that it's still morning. The day hasn't even properly started yet, and the sun is hot. He remembers heat. He tries to look behind him, see if any of the carnage (he caused) is still in view, but he keeps walking instead. Maybe he can leave now, if he never looks back. There's an empty side street ahead of him that demands to hear his footsteps. He takes the identifiable parts of his uniform and leaves it in a dumpster. He sets the dumpster on fire for posterity's sake.

He's done.

* * *

Steve wakes up immediately, for the first time in years from sleep unhampered by dreams. Sam is in the chair next to him, eyes down; when he looks up his smile doesn't reach his mouth. Steve grins back, or would, if not for the pull of stiches by his mouth. The hospital room defines antiseptic. Steve goes back to sleep and doesn't dream again.

(He almost prefers nightmares, if he has to dream. The sickly sweet ones from before are filled with yellow light and hope and leave him hollow to his core, aching for a never-was.)

Steve wakes up again, slower this time. His eyes are closed and he knows that Sam is still there – he doesn't breathe as quietly as he thinks he does. Steve smiles again.

"Don't say it," Sam says. Steve opens his eyes to the sound of a smile, but maybe Sam doesn't smile, or won't here.

"On your left," he responds.

(Sam smiles now, and Steve gets lost for a fraction of a second in the gap between his front teeth.)

"Damn it, Steve."

* * *

The Winter Soldier finds a jacket. Finds might be too weak a word – it's on the back of a cast iron chair in front of a café, and he cleans the pockets of a few old receipts before he's a block away. The girl he found it from might want them again. The Winter Soldier finds a wallet. Finds might be too weak a word – he finds it in the pocket of a man with a silk suit. He's surprised he recognizes silk. He's not sorry for taking the wallet.

Family picture – trash. Library card – trash. Business cards, debit card, gym membership, old receipts, bank cards, gift cards, airline membership cards – trash. He keeps the cash and the credit cards and the driver's license. He might be able to use them.

The Winter Soldier takes off his undershirt in a back alley and rips it to shreds. Makes a sling out of the scraps and some of the less ominous bells and whistles on his uniform. People look less at an injury. He pulls his hair back with a long piece of fabric and hopes the black will keep him hidden. People look less at shadows. He will walk with purpose in his combat boots and sling and people will not notice him. Individuality can be as much a shield as conformity, when used right.

This comes back to him.

He spends the day in a sports bar that has every television turned to the news. He orders the cheapest thing on the menu and water and spends six of his two hundred dollars. He doesn't think about the noise coming from the television – there isn't enough room in his head for such considerations. The triscelion is mostly in the water. It was an eyesore anyway, too masculine for subtlety. The bartender starts looking at him like he might explode so he leaves.

There are two girls in the alley behind the bar, where the Winter Soldier intends to spend the night. They're both crying.

"Thank god you didn't take that internship. Thank god." He notices the gold cross, small and modest, around her neck. She kisses the other girl and their foreheads rest against each other's.

"I love you," they kiss again, "I love you." It doesn't matter which one says it.

The Winter Soldier keeps walking.

* * *

The DOD makes Steve see a shrink. He guesses he should have been expecting it.

"I was a soldier too. Well, not technically," she tells him, "Lieutenant Colonel in the US Marine Corps."

"I'm a professor of psychology and sociology now. We did a seminar on you after New York. The Captain American Effect." All caps.

"I'm going to level with you, Captain Rogers, a lot of them think you're lying. Your last SHIELD psych eval was spotty at best. They want to know if you were trying to make a stunt out of a suicide."

He doesn't say much that session. They make him go back.

"SHEILD is going to continue to exist, just so you know," he learns her name is Elizabeth. She tells him the nightmares never go away. She tells him that she has happy dreams of being shot at in Iraq. She tells him she left for the same reason he did.

"And what reason was that?" he asks.

"Because we were hurting more than we were helping." And she didn't know why they were there anymore.

Steve thinks he might come to like Elizabeth. She hardly speaks at their next session.

* * *

The malls reopen the day after; they didn't open the day of. He spends an afternoon people watching outside of a record store. He doesn't know what to do with himself. There isn't room in his head to decide to do anything.

There's a girl who sits at the table next to his, and starts to talk to him. She's black, and has pretty eyes that are a little red around the edges.

"Did you know anyone in the crash?" she asks him.

He thinks about not responding. Pretending he didn't hear. Lying. "I don't know," he finally says.

Her eyes fill with a sadness so deep it rubs his lungs raw. There are imprints of flayed red openings in his minds' eye. He has to look away from both. "My step brother was in the building. They won't tell us if he made it or not."

"I'm sorry."

"I'm sorry."

The next day, after sleeping in a nerve-racking bunk bed in a old salmon-pink hostel, he goes to a different mall. Buys black t shirts, long and short sleeved. Black cargo pants. A pair of black leather gloves. Various adornments for his body. Soap. A 12 pack of underwear. Eyeliner. He doesn't think about the 75 dollars left in his pocket when he steals a black backpack. He stops by a laundromat and spends twenty minutes trying to figure out how to work the washing machine – reading wasn't crucial to the mission, but it's starting to come back in pieces. The Winter Soldier can't feel any memory making a reentry, but there's deja vu sometimes. He remembers the term deja vu.

The Winter Soldier watches his found jacket and old clothes that had been stiff with blood spin in the washer. The water goes pink. No one else cares.

* * *

Steve and Sam are sitting on the latter's couch watching football. It all feels very homeland, and the've just come back from Austria. There were reports of a man with a metal arm in a library there, but it didn't pan out and they only found a HYDRA weapons base near a monastery instead. Steve thinks he might want to rethink his priorities if wiping out a major base is disappointing in the wake of not finding one person. Sam falls asleep with his feet kicked up on the coffee table and his head leaning back against the couch, arms and legs crossed. Steve does too.

He dreams that Bucky was in the library of that monastery, staring at the books in his dress greens, how he looked the night Steve met Doctor Erskine. There's a spark in his eyes again, and he looks at Steve with a half smirk and an open face. Sunlight glints off gold fixtures in the background. Bucky doesn't move, so Steve stands next to him, and they smile at each other for a long moment.

When he wakes up, Captain Steven Rogers cries. Sam already went to work. He asks Elizabeth what she makes of his dream that afternoon.

"Were you and Bucky lovers?" she asks, tapping her finger tip against her glass tablet, after he finishes.

Steve sits up a little straighter.

"I left the Marines, specifically, because I fell in love with another woman. You can tell me, there's no shame in it," she says. She won't meet his eyes, the lovely shell pink on her nails holding her gaze.

"I know. We weren't, I mean, we didn't," he can't say it. "I wanted to." He says it.

She looks up then. "He was your best friend."

"Yeah."

"It means you miss him. Were you, you," she gestures to him, sitting legs crossed in an overly comfortable armchair, "or, like you were before?"

"I don't know. Somewhere in between, I guess."

"It means you miss him."

Elizabeth tells him that there's a panel discussion being held at the Smithsonian about him, and DC, and New York, and the NSA in a few days. She says she was asked to participate, but chose not to because of her closeness with his case. She says it doesn't seem ethical. She tells him he should go, that it might give him some perspective. Steve says he'll think about it, and that she should do the panel anyway. She looks at him for a long moment and says okay.

* * *

The man who was the Winter Soldier walks back to the hostel and thanks his lucky stars (he remembers) that it's only fifteen dollars a night. He gives the money to the owner as he's walking in and sleeps, without dreaming. He read (he remembers) that dreams only come during REM sleep, and that most people don't remember their dreams. He doesn't know which one he isn't getting, the memories or the sleep. Maybe he's slept long enough.

He starts taking the bus to the shadier parts of town, so bright under the still dust-obscured sunlight that the grime is almost invisible. He talks to a bartender, says he'll bounce if he can get paid in cash on a daily and asked no questions. The man says no. He tries again. Rinse and repeat. He goes to four bars before a haggard, paternal owner says yes.

The owner asks for a name. The man who was the Winter Soldier almost says no, that's a question being asked, but, "I just need something to call ya when I need ya."

"Jim," the man who was the Winter Soldier answers, "Jim Pierce." It's as accurate as anything, he supposes.

He starts that evening, makes fifty bucks, and goes to the Smithsonian the next day. He holds his breath, waiting for metal detector to go off as he walks in, but it doesn't. There's not enough space in his head to wonder why not.

He only goes to one exhibit, and wonders how he ever smiled that wide. He thinks his face would hurt if he tried it now. He thinks the man on the glass isn't him. Knows it is. Doesn't feel it, it feels like looking at some sort of stranger. "Everyone Has a Doppelgänger" a headline had read, on the newsstand he past. Maybe he's James Buchanan Barnes's doppelgänger. Maybe they were all just wrong about him.

He passes a cutout of Captain America again, and marks that idea down as improbable (he remembers that word). There's a sign by the door, just a poster, advertising a panel to discuss the changing myth of Captain America. It's a week from the day the man who was the Winter Soldier is there. He thinks he'll go, just to see if he remembers anything from it. He doesn't know to hope. There isn't enough room for hope in his head.

* * *

It's a Tuesday, before the panel, when Elizabeth finally asks the question.

"Were you trying to kill yourself, Steve?"

It's toward the end of their hour-and-a-half session, and Elizabeth was quite clearly getting tired of trying to make sense out of Steve's actions in a rational way.

"The only accounting of events is what you've told me so far, Steve, and from what you've told me, it seems pretty clear that you didn't care whether you lived or died."

"There's a difference between not wanting to live and wanting to die," Steve replied, automatic and angrily.

"I know that," she's leaned forward, elbows on knees, and she seems so much like a friend in that moment that he looks away. "That's why I asked. Were you trying to kill yourself, when you went to save Barnes?"

Steve has to look away. He looks back, and she asks the question again with her expression. "I wanted to save him," he answers, "I still want to save him. I wasn't really thinking beyond that.

"He deserves so much better than he's gotten, Elizabeth. That's what I was thinking."

She sits up a little straighter. "And you don't?" she asks.

"I asked for this," he says back, "I wanted – _want_ – to be the hero. I was ready to give up everything for what I believe in. Bucky," Steve looks away again, and shakes his head a little, "he didn't. He signed up because it was the thing to do. He didn't want this life. He wanted to be normal."

"That doesn't mean that you don't deserve the same thing," she says, "You get to have a life, even if you think it might have ended in the North Atlantic Ocean. You wanted to die there, Steve, you wanted this to be over, and it wasn't because fate isn't done with you yet."

She's right, and Steve knows it, and she knows he knows it.

"You miss your friend," Elizabeth says, "but that doesn't mean you should give up on your life."

* * *

The man who might be James Buchanan Barnes goes to the same seedy bar every night for two weeks. This might be pathetic if not for the fact that he now works there, standing by the wall in one corner and watching the goings on with a strong hunter's gaze. The patrons glance quickly away when they see him staring, hands moving faster and eyes going wider. He never looks at a person for too long, though.

He bought a new jacket, it's thicker and blacker than the old one, and with the gloves he's not as exposed as he was. No one will know about his arm unless he wants them to. (No one will know about him unless he wants them to).

There's something about this place that brings old images back up to the surface. A woman leans forward and laughs, and the only thing the man who might be James Barnes sees is a girl he dated and fucked two lifetimes ago. A man with a potbelly might be his father, might be an old dissident who fell in the wake of HYDRA. The weekday bartender looks like someone's mother, a too-thin woman with pale yellow hair and a ready smile and laugh. When she pays him at the end of the night she always gives him some of her tips and he purses his lips, trying to place her.

One night, a Wednesday, there's a petite girl with almost painfully long legs and a more painfully short skirt who leans up to the counter, stretching a little as if to show herself off. She orders something strong and holds it like a crusader carries a cross. On closer inspection, after she turns, she isn't a girl, she's a woman. A grown woman, and she smiles like the world is ending and she's happy about it. There might be something of him in her.

She spends most of the evening at the counter, ogling and being ogled. He tries not to look at her too much, but it doesn't seem to have worked because, after the maternal bartender calls last drinks, she sidles to him. He keeps his eyes on her face, as opposed to her rather ample bosom.

"You're a soldier, aren't you?" she asks, coming close enough that he can smell her ticklish perfume and whiskey.

He doesn't respond at first, just blinks and lets a raised eyebrow and a once over speak for him. "I was, once."

She inclines her chin a little, slowly. "Wanna take me home, soldier?"

"No," he uses her same tone, cocky and slow, and hopes she doesn't mind the theft.

"Wanna come home with me?" his response has shaken her, he can tell as she leans back on a heel a little. Her voice doesn't show it.

"Are you a professional?" he asks in lieu of giving an answer, letting his eyes skim down and rest lower than before. He looks back into her glass-glassy eyes for an answer.

"I used to be a soldier too," she says, "and I want to fuck you. Would you like to find a wall." The crack around the edges show, and the man who might be James Barnes hopes that she's not more broken than he is.

(He can't tell that there remain holes in his memories, just when he finds something new filling one of them).

He tells Sarah that he's going to head out early, and he might be late or leave early the next day. Sarah gives him his pay, thirty dollars in tips that he pockets, and a meaningful, nervous glance. He elects to ignore it. Some of the things he remembers are necks snapping in situations very much like this one. He can handle this girl.

As they're walking away, she asks why they don't stay there, at the bar. He doesn't say it, but he wants to keep her away. The bar, for all the cracks in the plaster and damp smoke hanging on from years of proprietors and bad alcohol, is something like a home now. It serves its purpose. He doesn't want her there.

They end up a few blocks away. She's grown impatient with waiting for him to find a place for them, and pulls him towards an alley that smells like urine and desperation (though that might be one of them) by putting fingers in his long hair, still held back in a low ponytail, and kissing him breathless. He can feel the pulsing music of the club they're leaning against through his metal arm, braced beside her head as he kisses back, hungry and angry and _wanting_. He's missed this, he thinks.

She stretches against him, like she did against the bar, but this time it's full of the same desperation that's thick in the air around them. It's starting to rain, just a fine mist that pushes down the urine smell and brings down some of the dust from the Triskelion, but it just makes the feeling worse. She wraps her legs around his waist, and, always proactive, pushes him off her enough to get at the thick black civilian belt he bought when his pants stopped fitting right. He pushes her underwear out of the way with his right hand.

He's almost inside. "Wait, do you have-"

"Don't worry about it, soldier," she says, and pulls herself onto him.

He was right. There is something of himself to be found in her.

* * *

Natasha turns up, bruised and scratched, the afternoon after his gruesome session with Elizabeth, and two nights before the panel she mentioned. The panel is starting to feel monumental to Steve, huge and looming on the horizon like a storm. Natasha's wearing a nice suit, the same as the one she wore to the hearing earlier that day. Steve lets her in, and Sam is cooking dinner in the kitchen.

"Saw you on TV today," Sam says over a skillet of scrambling eggs, "Are you sure it's smart to antagonize them that much?"

Natasha smiles. "I stopped caring. They can't do anything to us," she says, almost a laugh, then spins on a barstool to look at Steve and continues, "So I heard something about a research facility in L.A. Want to go?"

"When?"

"Now."

Steve hesitates, thinks for a long moment. "Can we be back by, say, five o'clock on Thursday?"

"Probably, if we hurry," Natasha answers.

Sam puts the scrambled eggs between slices of toast.

* * *

He decides to go back to the Smithsonian, after fucking that girl in the alley. There were sparks of old feelings in the back of his neck when he came for what he assumes must have been the first time in seventy some odd years. He feels kind of bad for pulling out and walking away.

He leaves his hood off this time, opting instead for aviator sunglasses, his beard and long hair, and the fact that he looks and feels more like a human being than he can remember ever being. The fact that he knows what he's not would be remarkable, if he had anyone to remark on it to. He knows what he was. He knows what he's not.

And that seems to be/have been James Buchanan Barnes, of the 107th. Bucky for short. Handsome, fiercely loyal, angry, soldier, Bucky. Bucky who knew what he was fighting for, who chose it. Who smiled at Steve Rogers like he hung the fucking sun. He doesn't know how to feel about it.

He goes at the end of the day, about 45 minutes before the Museum is supposed to close. He buys a ticket for the panel that evening. He sits in the video room and watches Peggy Carter talk about Steve Rogers like she knew him. He's pretty sure she's dead now.

He goes back to the glass momument to a dead version of himself twice – at the beginning and at the end – and he thinks about how dead he would be if it weren't for Captain fucking America, for Steve Rogers saving who he was so many times. He thinks he might have deserved it.

He ends up going into the theatre early, before anyone else gets there, and sits alone in a seat in the middle with a book, Hocus Pocus by Kurt Vonnegut. Someone left it on a seat on the subway.

* * *

"It's a pretty pessimistic way of looking at it, don't you think, that the only way to save the world is to destroy it, and the idea of personal freedom and autonomous thought with it?" Elizabeth is saying on the stage. Steve is late, the thing in Los Angeles didn't pan out like they were hoping it would. Bucky remains a ghost in more ways than one, and the facility was already in shambles when he got there, apparently taken care of by a 19 year old superhero pretender with a bow that he pretends not to see himself in. She's pretty, but he wonders when 19 started looking so young to him.

"I guess you don't really understand the whole concept of the social construct of sacrifice or freedom isn't free then, do you," one of the other panelists says to Elizabeth.

She does a minor spit take of the complemetary glass of water she's been drinking from. "Excuse me? Who was in the military, in this discussion? I understand the meaning of sacrifice; this was going to be slaughter. It comes down to the same question I've always had: if it weren't for us, the United States, going into Iraq, and Iran, and Afghanistan, or hell, even just not giving them support after the end of the Cold War, would we be in the situation? I think not."

"That's ignoring New York," another woman says.

"New York was an anomaly, and one that we need to prepare for now that we know it can happen. Our governments taking over our lives like they were going to, not so much. We should be protected from that in the first place," an older Indian man sitting on Elizabeth's right says that. Steve finds a a singular seat in the very back of the auditorium; almost every one is full.

"Then how does the War on Terror even fit into this discussion? We're living in a post-invasion, post-SHIELD world. How does that work?" the first non-Elizabeth panelist says.

"We're also living in a post-9/11 world, where apparently, to keep us safe, our government is willing to tap our phones and kill us. I think we might need to start moving into a more post-triseclion world, where we have less secracy and espionage, in favor of fewer American citizens, and even foreign citizens, dying at the hands of our government. And more personal freedom, too," Elizabeth takes a drink of her water.

The moderator, smiling stiffly at a podium, says, "We've run out of time, folks. Why don't we give our panelists a round of applause," she pauses for the audience to clap, "and makes sure to come back and look at our Captain America exhibit that all of these people have contributed to!" The crowd starts moving generally towards the door. Steve isn't sure why people seem so eager to leave now.

Then Steve sees him. Bucky Barnes, in something resembling the flesh. He's grown a beard, and puts a pair of aviators back on, but he's here. He's back.

Bucky starts toward the door still stuck in the crushing press of humanity. There's ten feet of aisle between them, and Bucky still doesn't see Steve as he walks outside. Steve follows anyway.

* * *

As he walks away, he starts to notice a man in his periphery who moves almost silently but has a looming presence. He hopes- there isn't enough room for hope in his head- he hopes anyway. He's not sure what he's hoping for. He leads on, thinking that if the man wanted to kill him he'd be dead already. He's not entirely sure where they're going, but he'll know when they're there.

They end up on the river bank, far from any street or path light, and he sits on the concrete-reinforced riverbank and looks out over the water. The man who followed him comes to a stop to his left.

He turns, and it's Steve standing there; his mouth is almost open and his eyes are wide.

Of course it's him. Who else could it be?

They don't speak at first; the inches between them are like miles, like their voices might not reach each other if they tried to make them heard.

He breaks the silence. He had a knack for breaking things, once. "That woman has a very high opinion of you," he says.

It's enough to break the ice between them. Steve moves forward slowly; he might get hit by the last remaining shards. "Which one?" he asks.

"The one with the glasses? Doctor Martel?"

"Elizabeth. She's a friend of mine." Steve is almost standing over him now. He swings his feet like a child as the silence stretches on, and neither of them look at each other.

"Bucky?" Steve finally asks, his voice breaking on the second syllable. It's a prayer more than a call.

"Maybe. I don't know yet," he responds, "I'd guess so, if I had to."

"I've missed you. Him. I don't fucking know. I just miss." Steve sits next to him, and he doesn't miss how Steve crossed around to his right side. The side without a glove.

"Do you have nightmares?" he blurts.

"Yes," Steve answers automatically, "all the time. Mostly of you."

The lights across the river glint and it makes him think of something. Two memories together: of blinking lights and music, and of snow and cockiness and subtle hope. They don't go together, but he can smell and hear them both with the same vividness, more than he's had before.

[ _This is payback, isn't it?_ ]

Bucky Barnes knows what can make him smile as wide as he used to.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **content warning for blood and discussion of violence**. if you want to skip that part, see the end notes.
> 
> Special thanks to [Ark](http://et-in-arkadia.tumblr.com) without whom this fic just would not have existed, and [Elissa](http://kon-centration.tumblr.com) who, when I said I was going to write more of this said, "DANG," and then, "FUCK YOU I'M GONNA WEEP ABOUT THIS FIC DAMMIT," which actually sums up our friendship pretty well.
> 
> Recommended Listening: [Damn These Vampires](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRTqDG9Mo18&feature=kp) by The Mountain Goats.

Bucky breaks the silence.  Bucky has a knack for breaking things.

"We were friends, right?" he asks.

Steve's heart contracts.  "Yeah. We were best friends."

"Were we more?"

Steve pauses.  "We might have been, eventually."

Bucky rests his head on Steve's shoulder while they watch the night get darker, more friendly to old ghosts like them.  The orange-pink streetlights reflect on the too-still river water and sparkle off in a mockery of stars.  There's nothing left to say.  There's everything left to say.

* * *

James Barnes, Jim Pierce, the Winter Soldier, Bucky, he walks home, or the closest thing to a home he has now.  He supposes he should find a place, but there's still too much screaming inside of him to be clever with him money, with his _everything_ , for him to put in the time to find the desire to leave the hostel.  Also, the woman who runs it gives him a discount for taking care of problem customers.  He gives Steve the address of the bar and says to use it if he ever needs it, needs _him_.  Steve writes down a phone number in a small book and rips out the page, says the same to Bucky.

"Don't," he pauses, "Don't go there unless you really need to, okay?"

"Let me drive you home?" Steve asks, but he won't look at Bucky.  Steve never looks at him when speaking; he expects a certain reaction, but doesn't want to look if he thinks it won't be there.  Bucky doesn't blame him – he only calls himself by that name because nothing _else_  really fits.  It only works about two thirds of the time in his own head anyway.

"No," he answers, "I'll walk home."  He was going to take the metro back to the bar, but it's such a nice night, and Sarah knows how to handle herself.  He wants to see if the stars will come out.

Steve looks worried at that – he always looks worried to some extent – but doesn't say anything, merely purses his lips.  On a whim, Bucky reaches forward and presses his right hand, his flesh and bone hand, on Steve's wrist, and makes a loose hold.  There are crickets chirping.

After a long electrified moment of merciless eye contact that might have ended in a kiss if they were different people, if they didn't know each other, if Bucky wasn't a defector, if Steve wasn't so goddamn sad, if they weren't both still held in the headlock of fear that stopped them in the 40's, if, if, if, he lets go and turns and walks away.  There's something new in him that lets him walk away, or maybe it was always there.  He goes, again, and doesn't look back.

Bucky walks down the streets like he knows them.  Maybe he does, somewhere in the smoke the clouds his mind.  After he leaves the richer part of D.C., they stop being semi-perfect grids and become more organic, as if laid out by the insane or others with minds like his.  But the city might just have grown as it needed to.  Occasionally, in a space between streetlights where it's dark enough his arm wouldn't glint if it were exposed, he'll look up and try to see the stars, the only things that feel older than he does.  There's age and fatigue and time so deep in his bones that he can even imagine he feels it in his metal fingers.  It's a phantom emotion for a phantom limb.

He doesn't know what will happen to him now.  There are Hydra relics in his blood, he's sure; something akin to bitterness wells up in the back of his throat when he remembers that.  The same feeling comes when he realizes that Steve and he are brothers in chemistry, if not in blood.  It would be simpler if Steve was his brother.  Maybe someone will take him in, he hopes to god that happens so he can let out the snippets of memory that are congealing together in his brain.  A Bolivian woman he killed in her own kitchen becomes his mother when _she_  was cooking, and this is the least concrete of the amalgamations.  He doubts he'll ever get everything back the way it came to him.  There will always be holes left over from those fucking Nazi sadists who, in the interests of shaping the century, went into his brain and played.  There is permafrost in some of the parts that made him a person, Bucky Barnes.  There are charred remnants of some of what made him a weapon; the orders and mission statements are gone, though the skills remain.  And so he is neither a weapon nor a man, but also both, and more.

The shadows are long at night.  Bucky feels like he lives in the overlap between the shadows of James Buchanan Barnes and the Winter Soldier, both towering figures of the past who have and will shape the public psyche in their own time, but Bucky isn't either of them.  He's just a soldier with bad luck.

* * *

It takes everything in him for Steve not to go after Bucky, not to follow him again.  Steve watches him walk away, one hand in his pocket and the metal of his left arm glinting where his leather glove doesn't quite meet the jacket sleeve, and just like when he was younger and smaller and he watched Bucky leave with a girl on each arm Steve turns around because he doesn't want to think about where Bucky's going to go, without him.  Steve walks back to his car and drives home, or the closest thing he has to a home now.  Sam is kind enough to let him stay.

He has an appointment with Elizabeth that afternoon at four thirty.  He goes to her office and his skin is vibrating off with the need to say something to someone who isn't Sam.  Sam's a good friend, but he also worries more than Steve does.  Sam didn't know Bucky.

He tells Elizabeth that he went to her panel.  Doesn't talk about the panel.

"Bucky was there," he says.

"Did you talk to him?"

"Yes.  He didn't," Steve pauses, "He wants me to leave him alone."

Elizabeth considers.  "Are you going to?"

Steve doesn't answer.

* * *

He feels an itch in his bones, has felt it since he walked away from Steve.  It's an odd sort of feeling.  It doesn't fit with the weight of guilt pressing down on his shoulders almost hard enough to slump them, as it would if he didn't stand up as straight as he does.  Nor does it go with the muscular ache of loneliness mostly inhabiting his biceps and thighs, ignored.

"Bucky" doesn't fit either, anymore; like the itch, Bucky sits in the back of his mind with the other, only half formed and less remembered personalities that HYDRA gave him, thawed enough now to show their flaws, left for considering on another day, at another time.  He doesn't call himself anything in his own head now, introduces himself as Jim Pierce when he has to, and runs long and hard and fast when the voices or the itch become too much to handle, runs until he can't think, runs until the only feeling is his real muscles screaming for it to stop like he used to though this is of his own creation, runs until he's lost himself in the city and has to wander until he finds himself again and starts to recognize how to get home.  On those nights he moves like the ghost he is; directionless and graceless and silent.  They're the only times he can sleep soundly.

It's on one such night that Steve finds him again.

If Bucky hadn't run out of himself somewhere around the National Cathedral, he might have noticed the groceries in Steve’s arms as he runs past; he might have noticed that it's _Steve_.  The bags crash to the ground and there's the sound of eggs breaking at impact that Bucky can't make sense of but does hear and Steve is running after him but every instinct and thought is off except _run_  so he does, as fast as Steve is, as far as either of them can until he, finally, stops.

And he turns around.  Steve is there in front of him, breathing hard, regarded without expression or recognition.  Steve seems to be speaking.  There is nothing in him that can communicate anymore.  It's been run out.

The next morning Bucky wakes slowly, and he's _Bucky_.  He is sprawled on his stomach on a bed that is much softer than his at the hostel, and it smells acutely of Steve.   _His smell never changed_  he thinks, and knows that it is true.

* * *

Bucky is sleeping when Steve checks on him, at about six in the morning.  By eight, he's waiting for it to be late enough that he can call Elizabeth and not wake her, standing outside the door to his own bedroom and trying to decide whether or not to go inside.  He doesn't, walks to the kitchen to make coffee and finally gives in and taps his phone to call Elizabeth at 8:12 and asks for a favor.

"I have a class this morning," she says, "I can be there by half past eleven.  Can you wait until then?"

He's saying yes when Bucky wanders back into the kitchen, feet bare and arm shining in the pale eastern light.  Sam was up at 6:30, Steve told Sam that Bucky is there, Sam left when Steve asked.  He wants this moment, alone with his friend.

And he seems to be getting one when Bucky smiles at him over a steaming ceramic mug of coffee, offered silently when Bucky stood in the doorway to the kitchen.  He looks uncomfortable in his own skin, but the smile is the same, has always been the same whether found in a hospital in Brooklyn or a ridge in Germany, or now a kitchen in D.C.  It's the rueful one, the "I'm sorry, pal," one.  Steve smiles back, hoping.

It's a long moment, the air is too thick with things Steve wants to say – how are you, can I touch you, what do you remember, _I miss you_  – and he's about to let one of them be heard when Bucky says, "Glad to see you're coffee's still shit."

Steve barks out a laugh, then glares without heat.  "My coffee is fine.  It's your taste buds that are broken," he shoots back after almost too long a pause.

"Whatever you have to tell yourself, pal," and Steve smiles because it feels less foreign, more like it used to, though Bucky still talks too slow.

Steve is reminded by his phone, on the counter, when Bucky stands to put his empty mug in the sink.  "I have a _friend_ , coming over a little after eleven," he says.

Bucky pulls out of his cat stretch suddenly, saying, "Do you need me to get out of your hair?"  He speaks faster than Steve has heard him since.

"No, she's coming here for you."

"Steve, I may be the cheap meat in this particular kitchen, but I can still do pretty well for myself.  I don't think you need to be getting friends for me to–"

"No, no, she's a therapist," Steve may be blushing, just a little.  It's an old feeling that he hasn't had in a long time, since Bucky used to tease him about Peggy in camps during the war.

But Bucky doesn't notice, just freezes.  "You want me to talk to a therapist?" he says, slowly, like the words haven't quite computed.

"She wants to talk to you," Steve answers, and it's not technically a lie but it's definitely not the truth either.  He doesn't care.  He wants his friend back.

* * *

The woman Steve spoke of comes at eleven fifteen, and though he wanted to, he doesn't run.  Bucky quieted a little, after the coffee and then toast that Steve gives him – he was offered eggs and everything, but declined – so he and Steve sit together in the family room watching ridiculous cartoons on the equally ridiculous television, only occasionally communicating, mostly with facial expressions.  He's trying to get _Bucky_  right and succeeds to some degree if Steve's laugh is anything to go by, but it's hard because he's not _him_  right now, even if he's not really anyone else.  The stories on the screen are over exaggerated, there's too much color and too little story to be entertaining, but he pays close attention anyway.  The over enthusiasm on the screen keeps the tension at bay.

The doorbell rings before he can work up any real annoyance at this new assault to his admittedly limited sensibilities.  He follows vaguely behind Steve, just out of view of the front door where a woman stands, a bag over one shoulder and a little out of breath.

They go to the living room, not the family room where the television is.  The woman is wearing s skirt that's just a touch too short, and he's very aware of her wedding ring.

She shakes his hand before she sits and asks, "What should I call you?"

"Um."  He doesn't know how he should answer.

"Just a moment," she holds up a finger and walks out of the room, going to talk with Steve in hushed tones.  Bucky walks over to the wall, the corner, and looks at the books on white shelves.  Steve comes in ever so quietly, the most delicate movements he may ever have made, to tell him that he's taking a walk.

"He shouldn't be back for at least an hour," Elizabeth says when she takes her seat again.  He sits across from her and tries to ignore the space that's staring at him from behind.

* * *

Since the Triskelion, Steve's sketchbook has been filled with Bucky.

This is not to say that Bucky wasn't in his sketchbook before; of course he was, they were best friends, but he was found beside the other Howling Commandos, beside Peggy and Tony Stark and Natasha.  Too much of Bucky in one place has a tendency to pull up old ghosts that prefer the dusty corner he's pushed them into. And Steve missed him.  Misses him.  There's been a hole stretching from his rib cage to his stomach on the right side that's been present and occasionally, in the dark, made itself known since he woke up.  If he's honest, it's been there since he couldn't reach Bucky's hand.  But that wound healed itself when he heard Bucky speak; even as Steve was being beaten bloody pulp he felt _whole_ , for the first time in decades.  Now Steve is painfully aware of the hole in his side, and the person who isn't next to him anymore.

It doesn't help that Bucky is in his house but still doesn't want to see him.

So now, maybe in some sort of masochistic desire to torture himself with the things he lost, maybe in the hope of filling the hole again now that he knows how, he draws Bucky.  Repeatedly.  The parts he remembers from when they shared an apartment mingle with theories of what his shoulder looks like now.  He draws Bucky smiling, and the tension eases for just long enough that it's the first time he's felt happy since he's woken up.  When he remembers how broken Bucky is, it's worse than waking up in the morning.

His shield has yet to be fished out of the Potomac – maybe it'll decay, rust, and everything will be over.  Steve isn't sure if he wants to think about everything that the shield and his dropping it means just yet, so he leaves it be and takes his sketchbook when he leaves Bucky with Elizabeth in the over-dim living room.  He walks through different places in D.C and tries, with moderate success, to capture the over confident grandeur of the federal buildings and the solemnity of the memorials, stopping at each in turn and feeling small in their shadows.  When he tries to draw the people around him, things get odd – instead of the silently enraged child, he draws Bucky with a bloody nose on the day they met; and athletic older man's back becomes Bucky one warm morning in their old apartment.  Bucky was always moving, never in stasis for long; he was too still this morning, all unnecessary movement foregone.  But he used to run, he laughed, his hands moved when he spoke, he fought, he fought for Steve.  So now Steve is haunted, and Bucky's ghost is present in the line of a laughing woman's neck, in someone's half smile, except it's so much worse because he knows that Bucky's not a ghost anymore.  So Steve captures all of it.

Steve's hands fly over paper because he can't yet move to help his best friend.  He sits on the marble steps of the Lincoln Memorial, made for and by better men and feels the hope deep in his bones, the hope that even though they can't go back, they may be okay again.

(Happy seems like a bit much to ask for).

* * *

Elizabeth asks again, softer this time.  "What should I call you?"

"Call me," Sergeant, James, Bucky, Barnes, Soldier, Weapon, "Jim."

"Okay," she straightens slightly and pulls a clipboard out of her bag, behind the chair.  "So Steve tells me you're starting to remember things."

It takes a second for him to pick up that she wants him to respond.  "Yes."

"What kinds of things?"

He remembers killing his mother ( _not my mother_ ) in Bolivia, or was it Bosnia.  He remembers a bright white day that was shattered by the smallest drop of red.  He remembers how happy Steve was when they were at war, and another smiling blond man mixes together and they both smiled at him on a train.  He remembers a smack across the cheek when he's small and anger after, he remembers a smack across the face when he's not small anymore and feeling nothing but the sting and that was worse, it's so much worse.  He remembers light and heat and the smell of burning metal and flesh and there are so many screams, but the background changes, is always changing, desert, city, everywhere.  He remembers bruises that he poked and smiled at with another boy smaller than him who might have been Steve, bruises that he catalogued, bruises that he ignored because he had to fight, had to fight, has to fight, he can't ever stop fighting.  But not hating, he stopped doing that.  He remembers the smell of new death, of old death, he remembers how he learned the difference, he remembers the friendship in a warehouse that smelled of mold and bones.  He remembers blood, the smell of blood, the drip and ooze of blood, the way blood looks on concrete, on brick, on snow, on sand, his own blood on his body, on both his hands fucking up the machinery, other people's blood on his knuckles and in his hair and hot on his face, blood in yellow hair, blood, blood, blood.  And a whole hell of a lot of violence.

"Everything, but," he licks his lips, "not everything, I don't know.  It's all, it's all mixed up."

The woman draws a few lines on her paper, and makes a note.

They don't talk about the things he remembers, not unless he wants to describe them.  She doesn't pry, but when he starts to think about a little girl (in a blue coat with crayon yellow hair fanned out like a halo that matched the sprayed scarlet fan against the white, white snow and her neck wasn't at quite the right angle) he can't speak for a moment.  There's no feeling in the memory; it plays like a home movie but the face flickers between almost fairy delicate and stronger jawed with eyes, glazed open, just like his.

The woman in front of him (whose face is enough her own to not make him think of anyone else) leans closer.  "Jim," she says, softer than she has been speaking, soft enough to bring him back to the warm room they sit in, "Jim, is this guilt?"

"I," he looks away from her, then back.  He doesn't cry.  "I don't know."

He closes his eyes, and she speaks like a mother, like a lover, like a friend.  "I'm not going to say that it'll be easier.  You will feel these things in some way, in some way forever.  They will never leave you.  But Jim," she cuts off, "look at me," he does, "You are more than the things you've done."

She's reaching with one hand over the low table between them; she's leaning forward and he's ready to be sick over the sympathy in her eyes.  He takes her hand.

* * *

Elizabeth is standing alone in Sam's kitchen, barefoot in her stockings, reading a magazine, drinking from a mostly full glass of water and eating an apple.  Steve walks in with something like nervousness.

"Where's Bucky?" he asks.

She swallows the bite and tells him that she sent him home.

"Is he alright?" Steve asks.

"Seems to be.  He's been through some trauma, so.  Given value of alright."  She's still looking at the magazine and doesn't meet his eyes.

Steve takes a careful step forward and asks, "Can you give me any specifics?"

She looks up and flips the magazine closed – it's The Economist.  She takes a deep breath and says that Bucky has PTSD, and other things that he wants kept between the two of them.  She says his memories will keep coming back, but.

"He might never have everything, Steve," she sighs, "He remembers when he sees things that spark recognition.  So much of who he was before, and so many of those memories were tied up in who _you_  were.  There's no trigger for those.  How he moves forward from here, well.  That's all up to how resilient he is."  She tells him that said he could know this.

"Can I," he stops, trying to find a reasonable request, "Can I see him?  Did he say anything about that?"

She looks tired.  "He likes to go to the memorials at the Mall, as much as he likes anything.  But I'd let him find you."

* * *

Bucky – it still feels odd to use that name, but on good days the haze between who he used to be and who he is now starts to get clearer – has been going to the Vietnam War Memorial.  He walks straight through the World War II memorial, pausing under the stars of New York where he reaches out with the metal hand to see if his theoretical, romanticized past can revitalize him now, to the wall of names at the Vietnam Memorial.

Steve's friend suggested that he start keeping track of his emotions, start trying to classify them so he can make sense of who and what he is, will be.  He stands under the names of men who gave their lives to an idea they didn't own and something like camaraderie, like anger, like hatred starts to blossom and he holds his hands tight enough in fists that the metal starts to give; it's the spark before the flame.  He doesn't stay there long.

The sunlight starts to feel hot on the back of his neck as he sits at the foot of the Washington Monument, wondering fleetingly how they'll memorialize Steve when he's gone.  When they've killed him.

He starts toward the subway station before he can get a sunburn, heading towards the outskirts, towards his corner, towards something a little closer to the nebulous concept of _home_.

There's an unpleasant looking young man sitting on a park bench that Bucky passes; he's overly pale, boney, has dark hair.  It might be the ramrod straight set of his shoulders, or the way his shirt hangs off his body that makes Bucky pause.  It isn't a pause long enough to even break his stride, but when he comes around the bend in the path that goes past the bench, Bucky can't look away.

The man has Steve's eyes, how they used to be – too big for his face, sunken into bruises.  He has yet to be crushed, but the pressure of life is starting to show in how slowly, how seldom he moves; everything has to be deliberate because everything counts.

Bucky is distantly aware that he's stopped walking, that he's staring at the man on the bench like he's a killer, like they both intend to kill.  His heart beat starts to go up out of something other than exertion for the first time he can tangibly remember.  He's dizzy, and tears his gaze away by force he didn't know he had, and starts moving – stalking – forward.

_This is anger_  he realizes when the tightness in his chest demands recognition, and the ashes of the Winter Soldier's mindless determination that have been hazing out every other person he has been, every memory he has had in all these lifetimes, start to collect into something new, something he might be able to control.

* * *

Steve almost goes to the Mall again.  He almost drives to a bar just outside the beltway.  He could use the (bare bones of a) network that he and Sam and Natasha have been setting up in the Metro area to find a particular shell shocked vet.

He doesn't, he respects that Bucky doesn't want to see him.  It's an odd reversal, and it aches worse than the bullets they pulled out of his stomach.  It's fitting that Bucky put them there.

He hasn't heard anything for a while; Bucky's been meeting with Elizabeth, but she won't tell him where or when or what they talk about, which might be for the best, but still makes him want to jump out of his skin.  Bucky hasn't contacted Steve again.  Bucky never contacted Steve in the first place.

So it comes as something of a surprise when, late on a Tuesday night, Steve sees the glint of metal that has heralded Bucky's coming in their new time from his perch on the deck out front.  He stands.

Bucky's skin doesn't hang off his bones like it did a few weeks ago.  His clothes and hair are clean, and the circles under his eyes, while still present, aren't as pronounced.  He's walking like a person and Steve wouldn't notice the way he steels himself when their eyes meet were he not watching so carefully.

There are ten stair steps between where Steve stands, arms crossed, leaning against the beam like he's relaxed (which he isn't) and Bucky. He looks more like himself than he has since before the war, standing almost sheepishly with hands in pockets.  They look at each other for a long time, seizing up, neither moving, neither sure of exactly what the other wants.

It seems to Steve that he takes charge too much, that he always needed Bucky more than Bucky needed him – he has never said as much out loud, but it's been a constant worry in the weeks when Bucky was conspicuously absent.  He goes first again because he can't stand the anticipatory film in the air.  "How're you?"

Steve looks at the wood steps as he speaks, but watches Bucky look at him, waiting too long to say, "Fine."

Steve likes this porch.  Sam's neighborhood is dark, the nearest streetlight is a quarter mile away and flicks off every fifteen minutes, and the trees mute the hazy city lights.  Steve comes out here and he can see the stars.

There is a statement, scientific conjecture, that Steve has heard repeated many times since he returned.  It has to do with the lifecycle of stars and the speed of light, and goes something like this: there is no way of knowing whether the stars are still alive because they are so far away that all they show is the light that used to burn.  It's scientifically improbable that all the stars in the sky are merely an echo of their former selves that give humans guidance, but it is possible that the only things in the sky are fragments of old, long gone ties.  In much the same way Steve is.  Neither notice it, but when Bucky looks at his exposed metal hand says, "I need your help," one pinprick of light disappears.  

Steve is painfully aware that they've never asked each other for help before, that it’s been freely given and expected.  "With what?"

Bucky looks back at Steve, or maybe it isn't Bucky that he's seeing at all, maybe there's someone else too, maybe his friend is a new person now. Or it could just be that the shadows behind his eyes are different.  "I want to dismantle Hydra.  I want burn it to the fucking ground and then spit on the ashes."

Steve walks slowly down the ten steep stairs and stands in front of Bucky, too close to be merely friendly but too far to be anything else.  "I still trust you," he says.

The converse, the corollary to the stars' nonexistence that is rarely discussed, is the fact that sometimes there is a new star, some new vaguely rotating pinprick of guiding light that is born in the sky while the people below go about their lives.  One day it might be canonized, but maybe it's best not to put names on the newest of things.

Steve shifts his weight forward, close enough to hear Bucky swallow.  He looks at Bucky's face, searching it for something, but Bucky won't meet his eyes, he's looking at the ground.  "You shouldn't.  I'm not trustworthy," he says.  

"I can," Steve wants to touch him, wants to feel the ridge between Bucky's skin and the scar tissue and the metal arm, wants to feel his pulse, wants to show Bucky that he's there with a warm hand at this most necessary of moments.  He doesn't.  He settles for reaching forward and circling Bucky's bone wrist with one of his (too big) hands, standing in a reversal of the way they had by the river, the way they had after the panel when he knew he was seeing some facsimile of Bucky behind the wheel.  "I can make my own judgements about people."

Bucky smiles, a small, watery thing that ends with a huff of a laugh, and pulls his arm out of Steve's grasp only to take Steve's hand in his own.  Bucky looks up, finally, and Steve's sure that the man looking back is his friend again, more sure than he has ever been since Bucky came back to him.

There's a star that comes into existence in that instant – one moment it wasn't there and now, suddenly, it is – in the Eastern sky above them.  It's not a large star, no one will name anything after it, but it's significant.  They don't see it come to life.  They kiss instead.

It's a dry kiss, chaste and barely more than a brush at the beginning, but it holds promise.  Promise that is quickly expanded upon when Bucky pushes forward, and something shatters with the movement.  Something awful shatters away.

It doesn't last long, doesn't go more than firm pressure and desperation, but when they break away at the same moment Bucky's arms are around Steve's neck, the metal just cold enough to have an edge, and Steve's hands are firm on Bucky's waist.  Steve laughs.

"What is it?" Bucky whispers, a smile, a real one, in his voice.

"I guess that, uh," Steve smiles too, "I'm going to need to get the shield back."

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **The paragraph beginning with the sentence "He remembers killing his mother" and ending with "And a whole hell of a lot of violence" and the paragraph beginning with "They don't talk about the things he remembers" have some pretty graphic descriptions of violence. Skip ahead a paragraph, or even skip the section, if you want or need to avoid them.**
> 
> I never intended to write this. I thought I was done but then _I wasn't done_.
> 
> [my tumblr is always open for comment, questions, or concerns, or even just sobbing over the continuing tragedy of Bucky Barnes and Steve Rogers](http://passiveaggressivegummybear.tumblr.com).
> 
> There are two vague literary allusions in this fic, one is from the poem [Degrees of Gray in Phillisburg](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171835) and the other is from the oft quoted [Out of Oz](http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/15502514-out-of-oz-wicked-years-4). If you happen to be able to point out the lines that are alluding to these and point them out in comments, you win a prize.

**Author's Note:**

> thoughts re: a sequel can be found [here](http://passiveaggressivegummybear.tumblr.com/post/82250263213/alright-so-a-lot-of-you-arent-going-to-care-about)
> 
> comments/questions/concerns always welcome!
> 
> i'm also on [tumblr](passiveaggressivegummybear.tumblr.com>tumblr</a>)


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